With the rain teeming down outside and the
temperatures falling with British persistence, it is easy to feel a trifle
gloomy. My esteemed Greek friends are clever but also prone to strike a
plangent note, and I note that the so-called Seven Wise Men of the ancient Greek
world, who gave us some brief words of rather banal wisdom, include a certain
Bias of Priene (he doesn’t sound neutral to me!), who declared Most People
are Evil…(Pleistoi anthropoi kakoi).
This is a scandalous slander of course but, as
is usual, it contains a grain of truth. The saying is often loosely translated
as “most men are evil” and that is a trigger for certain types of woke “wimmen”
to launch into a furious denunciation of historic and contemporary macho deeds
and attitudes. But Bias did not distinguish between the sexes and our
delightful sisters are tarred by the same brush as we males. The grain of truth
in the slogan revolves around the fact that all people have a dark side, a
concealed mental sub-world, skeletons in the cupboard we would prefer not to
resurrect.
Just how dark that “dark side” is naturally
varies a great deal from person to person. The spectrum of evil is a broad one.
At one end, there are the monsters so familiar to us from history and, alas,
the present. Then the darkness lightens from those with criminal propensities,
chips on the shoulder, family schemers, compulsive liars down to those who bear
grudges, harbour inappropriate erotic thoughts or are simply a regular
pain-in-the-neck.
If you had to create a League Table
of evil, contenders for the top spot would alternate between Stalin, Mao Tse-tung,
Hitler and Putin, followed by Pol Pot and Nero. To include the ladies, there is
always Lucretia Borgia. History also gives us Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula) from
15th century Romania, with allegedly 80,000 victims dying messily –
our Charles III confesses he is a cousin, 16 times removed, of Vlad, through
his great-grandmother May of Teck, Queen of George V. We can only hope 16 times
removed is far enough!
Lethal Vlad the Impaler
Many political figures have an ambivalent
reputation, demonised by some and admired by others, like Napoleon Bonaparte of
France, Franco of Spain, Ataturk of Turkey, Peron of Argentina or Mussolini of
Italy. Then there are lesser very controversial figures like Donald Trump and
even Boris Johnson, who hardly feature on the evil-meter, and, (OMG!) both could
easily return to office, just like Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet each country has her
plaster saints and I suppose Churchill, de Gaulle and Franklin D Roosevelt are
our contemporary icons – for the time being at least!
But ranking evil deeds is not a healthy nor an
uplifting occupation. A riposte to Bias’ ancient dictum comes from a rather OTT
Shakespeare:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!
Humanity has demonstrated these qualities through profound thinkers like wide-ranging Aristotle in Athens, the father of logic, enlightened David Hume in Edinburgh, founder of empiricism, or idealist Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who fortified ethics with his “categorical imperative.”
The philosophic trio,
Aristotle, Hume and Kant
More accessible in the search for beauty and
poetry are Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoy and Keats – all men of genius.
But the goodness of man is maybe best expressed in music. What could be more
uplifting than a Bach cantata?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBfHemeJTfg&ab_channel=Bachstiftung
How lovely shines the morning-star.
As Remembrance Day looms, we will be inspired
too by Elgar’s Nimrod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE&ab_channel=medpiano
The ancient Greeks rather favoured short
philosophic slogans, like Know Thyself, inscribed on the portal to the
Oracle of Delphi. But gateway slogans uneasily remind me of Arbeit macht
frei at the entrance of Auschwitz. So, forget about slogans and luxuriate
in profound literature and contemplation.
Whatever the temporary setbacks, our benevolent
human spirit will overcome all evils and the sunlit uplands beckon!
SMD
6.11.22
Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2022
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